Black Man / Thirteen

“We could have waited for the Lima hook,” Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. “Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.”

“I’m under instructions to rush,” she told him.

“Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambarén might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.”

“In that case, we’ll go there.”

“That’ll take some time.”

She gave him a superior grin. “No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.”

To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

“Want to eat?” she asked.

He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that simit.”

“Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”

“Do you want to eat or not?”

“Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & Olufsen, checked the welcome-screen protocol, and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view, and went to order from the next room.

Midway through sca

Hadn’t wanted any.

The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the Central Asian theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.

Bambarén’s particular limb of the familias were moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this—pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambarén was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambarén stayed out of their hair on the more vexing issue of local labor relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambarén’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-ru

Carl had entered the equation with no local ax to grind and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stefan Nevant. For two quiet weeks, he’d done his research, and then one night he held up one of tayta Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade—Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt—taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved cooperative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cartwheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below, and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burned with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind them a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts, and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile. Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambarén, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stefan Nevant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organized crime was concerned.

In the Bolivian predawn, he dialed accordingly.

“This had better be life or fucking death,” Greta Jurgens said coldly when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a gray silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. “Do you know what time it is?”

Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

“Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bedtime. How’s things, Greta?”

The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. “Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.”

“The very same.”

“What do you want?”

“That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small talk.” Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. “It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.”

“Manco’s not in town right now.”

“But you know how to get hold of him.”

Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-ski